Taylor Swift has broken up with Spotify. And, this time, she doesn’t feel the need to sing about it.

Swift — arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now — pulled all her music from Spotify on Monday, effectively forcing her millions of fans to pay to download her music (or buy it on a compact disc) instead of streaming her music for free (with ads) or as part of a monthly Spotify ad-free subscription. “We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone,” Spotify said in a blog post. “We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy.”

On thursday, Swift revealed why she pulled her music from Spotify. “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music,” she told Yahoo Music. “And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.” Swift appears to be taking a stand against streaming: She doesn’t believe that real fans Spotify music. She added that she released some songs from a previous album to Spotify, and “it didn’t feel right to me. It felt like I was saying to my fans, ‘If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.’”

She can afford to do it her way. “As an artist becomes very famous and rich, they stop needing the kind of exposure that Spotify can give them,” says Paul Booth, associate professor in media and cinema studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Swift’s latest album, “1989,” is on track to become the biggest album in over a decade, according to Billboard magazine. It’s predicted to sell 1.3 million copies in its first week, the fastest-selling album since rapper Eminem’s “The Eminem Show” in 2002, which sold 1.322 million in its first week and Britney Spears’ 2002 debut, “Oops!…I Did It Again,” which sold 1.319 million.

Music streaming is cheap for fans, but less lucrative for artists. Fans can buy Swift’s CD for the sale price of $9.99 in Target
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or download it for $12.99 on Apple’s
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iTunes; in such cases, the artist can receive a $1 or more per album. But why spend that on one album when you can stream music for free or pay $10 a month without ads? Spotify’s streaming service allows customer to choose all the songs; Pandora (P) plays music based on previous choices. Spotify pays rights holders $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream, but says it’s paid out over $1 billion in royalties ($500 million of which were last year).

“Taylor Swift is special,” says Duy Linh Tu, director of the digital media program at Columbia University in New York. “Her fan base feels so compelled to own a piece of the music,” he says. Swift’s Instagram and Twitter accounts — where she has over 12 million and 46 million followers, respectively — posts and retweets photos of her fans holding her album. “We live in a singles market. We don’t live in an album market. To be able to pull that off is pretty extraordinary in 2014.” Kanye West and Jay Z are more singles artists than album artists, he adds. “I don’t know whether we’ll have another artist like Taylor Swift for a while.”

Artists are experimenting with different ways of reaching their fans, Booth says. “When you’re downloading music, you’re only leasing it. Most people don’t realize that.” And other artists are trying to cut out the middle man. The rock and alternative punk singer Amanda Palmer used Kickstarter to raise funds for her album with a video that declared, “This is the future of music.” Fans pledged $1,192,793, far exceeding her goal of $100,000. “You need to be a recognizable name to do that,” Booth says, “but we will see more artists start to do what Taylor Swift is doing.”

This story was originally published on Nov. 3, 2014, and updated on Nov. 7, 2014.

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